# The Monopolist
*A Biography of Peter Thiel* — Legendary Biographies No. 114

- **Subject:** Peter Andreas Thiel
- **Written by:** Sterling Aldridge
- **Shelf:** Technology & Money / Technology
- **Published:** 2026
- **Extent:** 213 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink
- **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 213 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-110-9)
- **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Miles Ashby (ISBN 979-8-90623-173-4)

Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/114-the-monopolist.html

## About this book

He was born Peter Andreas Thiel on October 11, 1967, in Frankfurt, West Germany. His family emigrated to South Africa for two years and then to Foster City, California. He read philosophy at Stanford as an undergraduate, founded The Stanford Review in 1987 as a libertarian rebuke to the campus left, earned his Stanford Law J.D. in 1992, and in December 1998 co-founded Confinity — the company that would, after its merger with Elon Musk's X.com, become PayPal. He sold PayPal to eBay in 2002, founded the global-macro hedge fund Clarium Capital in 2002, co-founded the secretive defense-and-intelligence software company Palantir Technologies in 2003, made the first outside investment in Facebook in August 2004 ($500,000 for 10.2 percent), founded Founders Fund in 2005, and funded a 2016 Hulk Hogan invasion-of-privacy lawsuit that drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy.

Sterling Aldridge's biography traces the arc with the documentary patience the subject's network requires. The book covers the Frankfurt-South Africa-California childhood, the Stanford years and the René Girard mimetic-desire intellectual education, the Confinity-PayPal founding and the long mafia of co-founders that would build half of post-2000 Silicon Valley, the Clarium years and the long-bond bet, the Palantir building of the post-9/11 intelligence-software apparatus, the 2009 Education of a Libertarian manifesto, the Thiel Fellowship that pays college-age applicants $100,000 to drop out, the 2016 Republican National Convention speech that broke ranks with the Silicon Valley consensus, the Gawker case, the long alliance with JD Vance from the Founders Fund principal years onward, and the current 2026 quiet of the Maui hilltop home.

What emerges is a portrait of the German-born American venture capitalist whose network has, more than any other living person's, shaped both the modern Silicon Valley and the modern American right.

## Contents

1. The Chemical Engineer's Son
2. The Farm
3. The Stanford Review
4. The Ideology
5. Confinity
6. The Mafia
7. The Money Machine
8. The Board Seat
9. The Seeing Stone
10. The Contract
11. The Weapon
12. The $500,000
13. The Bet
14. The Gospel
15. The Escape
16. The Protege
17. The Network
18. The Question
19. The VP

## Questions

**Who is The Monopolist about?**

Peter Andreas Thiel. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Monopolist — and the name goes on the line underneath.

**Is this an authorised biography?**

No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.

**Can I read some of it before buying?**

Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,007 words of the book.

**How long is it?**

About 64,000 words, 19 chapters, 213 pages in the paperback.

**What is the printed book like?**

6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.

## The writer

Sterling Aldridge is an Atlanta-based business journalist whose work for Bloomberg Businessweek and The Wall Street Journal has focused on the founders, fraudsters, and venture capitalists of the late-stage tech industry. After years of reporting on the ground, he transitioned to writing book-length portraits of industry figureheads.

His biographies, including Satoshi, On the Run, and The Monopolist, examine the human cost of rapid technological scale. Other works like The Encino Hills, The Lanai Purchase, and The Five-Day Firing focus on the high-stakes boardroom battles that define modern Silicon Valley. He has also authored The Black Turtleneck and The Glen Park Library.

He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he spends his free time restoring midcentury modern furniture and cycling through the city's historic neighborhoods.